Nothing But the Chimney

Abandonment, death, and an ethic of the built environment

I’ve always found abandoned buildings fascinating. They were, I think, the first built-environment-related interest I ever had, long before I knew anything about urban planning. The first urbanist-ish article I ever wrote imagined the abandonment of a little landmark motel not far from where I grew up.

And not far into my writing career, I followed that up with a sort of sequel on “the wisdom of abandoned buildings”:

In a wistful passage of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith stumbles into an old antique store and browses the merchandise: a serious crime in his society. He finds an old record player and a beautiful paperweight. The Party, Winston muses, established its totalitarian hegemony not just by burning books and executing dissidents; it did so also by continually rewriting history and purging it of such things as filled the antique store: unique, interesting, beautiful things, things unmistakably pointing to a very different period of human civilization and thus suggesting the possibility of a very different way of life. When life is experienced as one dismal extended present moment, when people are not aware of their place in time and history, it is much easier to establish control over them. Orwell, of course, wrote this thinking of Soviet communism. It also uncannily describes life under modern American consumer capitalism.

There is therefore something political—something conservative—about preserving, or at least documenting, seemingly quotidian things like the appearance and merchandise of old department stores and motel rooms, or the history of now-abandoned retail stores and their neighborhoods.

In other words, historic preservation not as an end in itself, but a means to preserve and transmit cultural memory and a sense of deep time and humility in those of us who inhabit a place right now.